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About

JILL McCOOMBER – PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART

Thank you for checking out my work.

I’ve been obsessed with photography since I was about 9 years old. I started out developing 110 film in a closet, graduating to 35mm and larger formats. I will always love film, but my heart has been won by digital photography. I enjoy creating art by combining in-camera composition with digital image manipulation, often just fiddling with the controls until I get something cool dialed in. Most of the time, though, it’s the camera that captures the real art.

For a few years I’ve been toting my trusty Pentax 10-megapixel DSLR and my favorite all-purpose lens, a compact, versatile Sigma 28-200mm. I’ve killed a couple of Nikons by using them in the desert’s unforgiving weather; I basically silted and baked them to death! This Pentax has held up brilliantly so far. I know it’s time to upgrade but I’m resisting.

I am presenting here a limited portfolio of my recent work. As you peruse my postings you’ll notice an overall theme that winds its way through these pages. I love the desert and its history and prehistory; it’s an interdependent timeline of life from its ancient geological formations to the 900-year-old petroglyphs that adorn them; from ruins last inhabited over 800 years ago by the ancestors of the Hopi and Navajo tribes to the remnants of Civil War-era forts, and gold mines abandoned in the beginning of the last century.

I feel the essence of the ancients when I visit these places and imagine the culture and daily lives of the people who lived there. I find myself imagining I might have stumbled upon the highest and best use of today’s technology right here, by electronically creating photographic images that exist only in ones and zeros, but still – when I’m very, very lucky – have the power to invoke feelings of wonder and amazement toward humankind and this Earth we share.